Czech Copyright Bill Undercuts Copyleft, Artists

Andorin writes "Earlier this month a copy of a draft of the Czech Republic's new Copyright Act [Czech PDF] was leaked to Pirate News. Included among several disturbing provisions are new regulations for 'public licenses' such as Creative Commons licenses and the GPL/BSD licenses. The amendment essentially requires that an artist wishing to use a public license must notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question. This goes against one of the strengths of Creative Commons and other licenses, namely the ease with which they can be applied. Additionally, collecting agencies will have increased jurisdiction over copylefted and orphaned works. ZeroPaid covers the story, noting that the amendment also reduces the royalties which artists receive from libraries by 40%, with that money instead going directly to publishers."

Comments

Speechless

[rantomaniac]

I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date. We're all accustomed to copyright being made more strict, but actively making it harder to release your works under permissive licensing is a new low.
It's like the copyright lobbyists didn't care about keeping a low profile anymore and shouted "we own your government" from the rooftops.

Re:Speechless

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs more money to hide what they're doing and achieve their goals in secret.
They just realized theres no point in hiding it any more.

Its not like the reality tv addicted people of generation-emo will do anything anyway.

Re:Speechless

[Anonymous Coward]

Us: It's a bad law.

Them: But, it's a law! There must be a good reason! Why do you think about stuff like this!?!

Re:Speechless

[mwvdlee]

It would be interresting if the same laws were to be applied to all copyright licenses. Want to publishing something closed source? "notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question".

Re:Speechless

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me... Free has little to do with price. And in the case of GPL and LGPL, the price is as follows: "If you use the software you have to provide the source and any possible modifications you might have made to the people you sold/gave the software to." That's the price. Whether you view it as worth nothing or priceless all is in whether you're just a user or a developer.

Re:Speechless

[jedidiah]

> Face it. The age of the freetard is over. It's time to pay people what their work is worth. Freeloader.

What if the AUTHOR declares that price to be ZERO.

Why should a Robber Baron Wannabe such as yourself have ANY say in the matter?

This is an assault on the rights of AUTHORS.

People who whine "freetard" should be all over this.

Of course that word doesn't really mean anything.

Re:Speechless

[tinkerghost]

I don't see how it needs special casing, it's copyright infringement. I'm no fan of the Berne Convention, but it requires copyright to be automatic and involve no formal registration. It's only fair to either uphold that treaty for both copyright and copyleft, or neither.

Legally speaking, there is no copyleft. It's simply a legal issue of licensing a copyrighted work under a royalty free license. The problem isn't with the copyright, it's with the collection agencies and their mandates. Since they are set up to collect for all the works under their purview, copyleft agreements confuse them.

In the US, ASCAP collects for recordings by Spanish, French, and Outer Mongolian artists - those people never actually see any money since they aren't usually registered with ASCAP, but they do collect. According to ASCAP, it is a violation to not pay for the use of the songs, even if the songs have been released under a royalty free license. The only exemption recognized by the law that allows ASCAP to collect is public domain works - so it's possible that they are correct. That is a flaw in the law creating the collection agencies not the copyright law.

The issue is that the vast majority of the works are used under national Mandatory Licensing regulations. This allows venues to use the works without having to negotiate individual use licenses. Because they are built around the ML, individual licensing agreements aren't considered when calculating royalty payments to the collection agencies. There are 2 approaches to resolving the issue:

1. Require registration of "collect" works.
2. Require registration of "do not collect" works.

Given the vast disparity of volume in "collect" vs "do not collect", the easy solution is to require copyleft works to register. This also has many other advantages for the collection agencies:

• Simplified paperwork.
• Shorter search lists - exclude vs include.
• More royalties collected that will never have to be passed to artists.

Since I can't read the original proposed law, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and say it seems to be a step in the right direction in that it at least codifies the right of an artist to remove their work from the mandatory collection pool without having to deposit the work in the public domain.

Current law isn't much better either

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently the Czech law requires you to pay royalties to collecting agencies regardless of the fact that you are not a member of any such agency and therefore will never get any money of them back.
It doesn't matter that you are only playing music composed by you, you are still obliged to pay.

Re:Copyleft does complicate the system

[rantomaniac]

I don't see how it's fair to demand registration of copyleft and not other copyrighted works. Enforcement of copyright is (and should remain) a private not criminal matter, the government doesn't have to hunt anyone down. I imagine the authors of the work will show up in court if they file infrigement charges.

Waiting...

[retech]

I'm waiting to form an opinion until Cory Doctorow posts some long winded treatise on Boing Boing.

copyleft is simple

[OrangeTide]

Or treat copyleft as a license, a form of contract. And settle disputes in a court, presenting evidence that the license was applied to an original creation. Which is how it manages to survive in the rest of Europe.

VIolation of the Berne Convention

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this a violation of the Berne Convention?

According to Wikipedia:

Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention.

Re:VIolation of the Berne Convention

[jdgeorge]

Appears that is correct; this draft is not compatible with the Berne Convention.

Of course, it is only a leaked draft, not even a public document, so it has likely not been subjected to normal sanity checks, or by normal, sane Czechs.

Re:Think of the Artists

[DarkKnightRadick]

I don't see how restricting an artists rights to apply whatever license they want to their creation is helping them in the least.

Re:Copyleft does complicate the system

[jimrthy]

I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.

I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.

Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.

The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?

The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?

Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.

It has a very good chance of passage...

[lexidation]

Take it from someone inside the Czech Republic. The reason: this is still not a full democracy in the Western sense. Corruption is still rampant. And that extends all the way up to Parliament. If you think lobbyists in your country have power over legislators -- try living in this place. Translation: if anyone with an interest in destroying copyleft has enough money or interesting favours to pass to the politicians, the bill gets passed. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, like one of our recent ones, may well turn up standing on a beach in Italy somewhere with a boner. Will the Czech people do anything to protest? Even the ones who understand this issue will not. After fifty years of the old regime, no one feels any power to stop what the politicians do. This is precisely the dynamic they take advantage of to pass things like this. It is the perfect location to set this kind of precedent.

Re:Think of the Artists

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a performing artist wants more money, he should have to execute another performance.

Artists should be paid for live music. In the modern technological landscape, digital copies are no longer the product, but rather the advertisement.

And besides, even if that wasn't true, there is nothing that says an artist has to be an artist. If artists can't make a living being artists, then they can go get a job that pays, just like the rest of us. I see no evidence that this will result in a complete absence of new music, and if it does then the forces of widespread demand will create new opportunities to profit on music.

So your justification of your outdated business model is crap. Music publishing is an anachronism, and you need to stop taking our freedom away, move into the modern era, and get yourself a real job.

Re:Think of the Artists

[Moryath]

Translated more simply:

If you have the money like the MafiAA does, you TOO can buy incredibly asstarded laws to protect your illegal monopoly price-gouging and put those uppity little "artists" back in their rightful slave-labor places in shitty little countries like the Czech... or UK... or USA...

Re:Copyleft does complicate the system

[roman_mir]

Except that the actual truth is on the exact opposite side of the spectrum.

Fashion industry shows how profitable it is, especially compared to most other industries, and in Fashion industry there are no copyrights or patents. Sure there are trademarks, but no copyrights or patents at all, and they are highly creative and profitable, thus proving your position inconsistent with reality.